Computational Trends

This is an informal forum for discussing upcoming changes in the computing industry and their effects for Daylight products. Gripes about current products and possible solutions are also welcome.
 

Some of the visible upcoming changes we see are:

• Intel-based platforms are getting cheaper and faster.
  • It is possible to buy a 700 MHz Intel box for under $2000. This will only get cheaper with time. If one builds a box, the price goes down by a factor of 3. As Anthony Nicholls of OpenEye mentioned, he could build a dual cpu 500 MHz Intel box for under $700.
  • As Intel and AMD battle it out, consumers are gaining from the price wars. Chip speeds have increased. Before the third quarter of this year, we will have 1 GHz chips from both Intel and AMD.
• Unix on Intel has gained importance. As Solaris on Intel is not as efficient as Linux on Intel/Intel compatibles, there has been more development of Linux on Intel.
• IBM is now offering 24X7 support for Intel. HP and RedHat are following suit.

As a result

• Several pharmaceutical companies, which a year ago said that they would not be considering Linux, have now reversed their decision and are now using Linux clusters of Intel boxes.
• Developers can now do toolkit programming on laptops while travelling
• There have been a couple of requests for a complete tailored database browsing solution on a laptop. Is this something that our users would like?
• As a result there is also a growing demand for PC ports.

Most Unix flavors have migrated to 64-bit addressing, 64-bit Linux on Intel has already been released for the Intel Merced (aka Itanium) which is expected to be released this year.
As a result, 64-bit thor will be available RSN on 64-bit Unix and will be available on 64-bit Linux as soon as it becomes available. (64-bit addressing for file-systems is already available in Linux on Intel, however 64-bit pointers are not yet)

While Java has lost momentum on the front-end (due to Microsoft's mostly successful attempts at killing it) it has gained tremendously on the server side. Java servlets and Server-Side Java & JavaScript are being used increasingly.

• As a corollary, several companies are now using Sun's JavaPlugin in their browsers for their Java requirements. This will mean that in the future Daylight will be producing solutions that run on Java 2 in the Java Plugin.
• At the back end, we are also considering a Java object interface to the Daylight toolkit, along with a Daylight Java Servlet interface to use on a web server. Is this something our users would find useful?
• Several attendees at this meeting have informed me, that while my Java-based SMARTS tool is a novel and neat way for creating boolean based queries which they would like to get, their users are so attuned to Isis Draw that they would rather not migrate from it. Hence should we adopt a MDL-based strategy on the front-end?